Who was Juscelino Kubitschek?

A doctor from Minas Gerais

Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira was born in Diamantina, an old diamond-mining town in Minas Gerais, on September 12, 1902, and trained as a doctor. In 1940, as mayor of Belo Horizonte, the state capital, he hired a 32-year-old architect from Rio to design a group of buildings around a lake, Pampulha. The architect was Oscar Niemeyer. Sixteen years later Kubitschek would call on him again. From 1951 to 1955 he governed Minas Gerais.

The election and November 11

On October 3, 1955, he won the presidency with about 36% of the vote, against 30% for Juarez Távora. The Constitution of 1946 required no absolute majority, but his opponents used the figure to challenge his inauguration. He was also the political heir of Getúlio Vargas, who had ruled Brazil from 1930 to 1945 and again from 1951, and who had taken his own life a little over a year before. Part of the opposition party UDN, and of the barracks, feared the return of Vargas’s movement. Vargas’s story is in Who was Getúlio Vargas?.

On November 11, 1955, the war minister, General Henrique Lott, sent troops into the streets, and the acting president, Carlos Luz, fled aboard the cruiser Tamandaré. Some call it a preventive counter-coup that guaranteed the inauguration of the man the voters had chosen. Others call it a coup, the army deciding who would govern. Kubitschek took office on January 31, 1956, with João Goulart, known as Jango, as vice president.

Fifty years in five

His Plan of Goals, the Plano de Metas, set 30 targets, from power plants and highways to schools and factories, summed up in his campaign slogan, “fifty years in five.” Foreign carmakers opened plants, and Brazil began building cars, trucks and the Volkswagen Beetle. Industry grew about 80% in six years. In 1958 Brazil won its first World Cup, with a 17-year-old Pelé, and bossa nova was on the radio: Brazilians still call these the Anos Dourados, the Golden Years. The “goal of goals” was a new capital in the middle of the savanna, inaugurated on April 21, 1960. The bill came with it: money printing, foreign debt and inflation of 39% in 1959.

Banned, exiled, and the Via Dutra

In 1961 he was elected senator for the state of Goiás, with his eye on the 1965 presidential election, in which he would be the favorite. On April 11, 1964, ten days after the military coup, he voted in Congress for General Castelo Branco as president. Less than two months later came the decree.

The President of the Republic […] resolves: to revoke the legislative mandate and suspend for ten years the political rights of Senator Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira. Brasília, 8 June 1964.

Years of exile followed, in Paris, Lisbon and New York. Back in Brazil he joined old rivals such as Carlos Lacerda in an opposition front, the Frente Ampla, and was jailed for a few days after AI-5, the institutional act of December 1968. He wrote memoirs, among them Por que construí Brasília (Why I Built Brasília, 1975), and kept a small farm in Goiás. He died on August 22, 1976, when the car he was riding in was hit by a truck on the Via Dutra highway; what the official inquiries concluded is in How did Juscelino Kubitschek die?. At his funeral in Brasília, about 60,000 people sang his favorite tune, the folk song Peixe Vivo.